Half a century ago, a Muslim prayer leader (Imam) in a remote Jordanian village fell sick in Ramadan, thus failing to lead people break their fast (iftar). To avert any discrepancy, a priest in the neighboring church rang the bells to alert fellow Muslims to for the iftar.
However, inter-religious harmony is much older than the last few decades.
Over 100 years back, a Christian from Marar tribe donated land for a mosque in Madaba, the southern side of Jordanian capital, Amman. The state built the mosque in the country’s third most populous city and named it Masjid Al-Hussein Bin Talal.
~ Read more

Hate speech has raised its ugly head again but with incomparable fallout. The low-budget, amateurishly-made film – Innocence of Muslims – re-ignited the flames of Islamophobia by mocking the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Within days, French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published blasphemous cartoons of the holiest figure for the Muslims.

Muslims reacted in sync with the script, predicted by the Islamophobes in the West. As the Muslims protested on all of the six inhabited continents on the planet, extremist militants in Libya’s coastal town of Benghazi murdered the American ambassador besides his other colleagues. Though the Libyan government and the Muslim nations alike expressed shock and condemnation over heinous killing of an ambassador, Washington dispatched naval destroyers to Libya.

While spells of protests continue across the world, Pakistan’s government minister announced a bounty of $100,000 for the killer of the US citizen behind the production of the provocative film. The Pakistan government was quick to distance itself from its minister’s call while the United States branded his remarks as “inflammatory and inappropriate.”~Read more

The name of Switzerland's most famous historical hero is, of course, William Tell. More recently, a man called Roger Federer has joined the hall of fame.

Few, though, would have predicted that the latest hero to make Swiss hearts swell with pride would be called Xherdan Shaqiri - not to mention his team-mates, Valon Behrami, Granit Xhaka, Haris Seferovic, or Admir Mehmedi.

They are all members of Switzerland's national football team, currently ranked sixth in the world, and set to take on Argentina in the last 16 of the World Cup in Brazil.

They are all Muslims, in a country which very recently voted to ban minarets.

And they are all immigrants or the children of immigrants to Switzerland, ~ Read more

"Pakistan, Turkey’s twin brother, could sustain and ward off pressure from its dominant ruling military due to independent and powerful judges, and the constitutional power they were exercising. If Erdogan goes ahead with his rash decisions of subordinating the judiciary to the justice ministry, the next coup leader won’t need much legal homework."